


What Just Happened

by LiquidInk



Series: Windows onto Dying Worlds [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, But with throughlines, Dreams vs. Reality, Dreamsharing, Extensive References, Gen, Metafiction, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Beta Read, Post-EDA Novels, Post-Twelve Angels Weeping, Post-series 12, Probably Not Complete, Snippet Collection, Spoilers, Surreal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 7,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27093109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidInk/pseuds/LiquidInk
Summary: We all know how it works. We know the details, and the facts of things....Don't we?A collection of Doctor Who-inspired snippets and oneshots. Expect extensive Classic and Expanded Universe Doctor Who references, mingling with NuWho content. There may also be a longer narrative in play.
Series: Windows onto Dying Worlds [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1987045
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Shatterpoint Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > Sing the past to me, 'cause I'm the one who wrote the song,
>> 
>> I made it up next week so all the words will come out wrong,
>> 
>> The past won't keep you warm tonight, the future's blown to bits,
>> 
>> And everything that you believe is really full of– 
> 
> -Unknown, Archive audio from San Francisco, October 31st 2002(Date Conflict{Paradox})

A tall man stood in the corner of her dream, and an infinity away. Solemn eyes scrutinised the details of her.

She was in her rooms. Not the place she went to to sleep since her conscription, but the place she'd used to _live_. Her old office, back from after she'd left the Agency and before they'd come knocking; It had been so long-- Three regenerations! -- that she'd nearly forgotten what it looked like. Feel and smell and sound. The tired desk was like a new friend, and she ran her fingers across the rough and battered grey corners, and breathed in the scent of the dusty peakwood. Atop a small cabinet, a potential engine put-put-putted away as it searched timelines and printed pages of identification sheets.

Her eyes skated away from the desk drawers and down toward the floor, lost beneath a sea of paper, a thigh-deep ocean filling the room.

The tall man watched silently.

She reached down and picked up a face-down page, turning it to read.

THE DOCTOR. BORN TO HOUSE OF 

LUNGBARROW, CREATED BY THEIR LOOM

AS PER THE DECREE OF RASSILON…

Oh. This one again. Maris placed it on her desk and picked up another.

THE DOCTOR. BORN TO A HUMAN MOTHER

AND TIME LORD FATHER ON THE HOLIDAY

OF OTHERSTIDE UNDER THE…

She put it with the first, noting that both were quickly turning blank. She didn't bother checking further, she remembered how this went: None of them were lies and all of them were real. There was no beginning or end to it. None of the birth notices matched, none of the histories overlapped. He had multiple degrees in higher-dimensional mathematics and quantum computing from a university that _does_ exist but, when she originally checked, hadn't. He actually had hundreds of degrees, and none. 

He had seven grandmothers, dozens of parents, one missing brother, and no family at all. He came from a noble estate both allied with and dissociated from Oakdown House. He grew up an orphan and lived his childhood alone in a barn, and he lived out his youth in Lungbarrow (which doesn't exist) before disowning all of his cousins (who are all dead, except one). 

He committed his first murder before he was ninety, killing a student with a rock, and he nearly committed his first murder well after his nintieth year before a human he had kidnapped intervened.

Maris had read all of these. The Celestial Intervention Agency had dropped in after the death of the technicians and the theft. They'd confiscated the potential engine, all the papers, and several memories. The bodies had also gone missing. 

She glanced up. The child sat in a chair opposite her, androgynous in theory but dressed like a boy, its robes non-descript, lacking house insignias and colour, eyes smokey, and existence flickering, wavering in and out of real. The star of these dreams, typically.

"One day I will catch up," it insists, every inch the petulant child it pretends to be. A crack began to split open in its face from forehead to chin, and down, throat opening, and down again, unfolding upward and outward, rapidly into an opening large enough to envelop a person, a city, a world. _A dream_.

The tall man had moved closer now, close enough that when the child moved the man was eaten with her, his suit made of finest crystal, chiming as the jaw-like doorway slammed closed behind and around them.

The Guardian leaned to her in the darkness, darkness where there should have been the TARDIS' console room, and whispered in her ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem was borrowed from _Unnatural History_ , by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman.  
> The Potential Engine's Doctor Ident Sheets are samples borrowed from _Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir_ , by Dave Rudden.


	2. When mother is a mermaid anything goes.

'I think I'm owed an ending.'

Sally gave him a look over the rim of her mug and the dregs of her coffee, and resumed scratching at her notebook with her biro.

'As the protagonist, I'm owed that much, Sally!'

'Okay, one,' Sally raised a finger. 'You're not a protagonist. My protagonist was just based based on you.'

He looked ready to argue so she interrupted him, raising a second.

'Two. The universe does not revolve around him. Or you.'

She fiddled with her butter knife as he gesticulated wildly, a tea cosy in-hand.

'Sally, Sally, Sally! Clearly it does! It must! Even when you've written him out the narrative is defined by his absence. The void he leaves behind that no other can fill.'

'Four: That's precisely why I can't give it a good ending, John. The entire narrative is a house of cards, and he's the foundation of it.'

'What happened to "Three"?'

'You raised a good point and I was distracted by my scones and jam.'

'They are rather good,' he mumbled around a mouthful. 'Anyway, his death is foretold. He dies, and his past-self knows this is going to happen because he salvaged and burned the then body to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. We, the reader, know when he does this all and dies as well because it's been told to us, but we already know something is wrong. There is more to it . "There is some question of the corpse's pedigree." and all that.'

'That's the inevitability working against the necessity.'

'Pardon?'

'You said it yourself. I can't remove him because the end result is total narrative collapse, you can't replace him because it's obviously superficial regardless of success or failure, and the overarching storyline can never develop because it's still bound up in the same storyline repeating on loop ad nauseam. Usually for the sake of mangst.'

'I'm not that bad.'

'Yes.'

'When have I ever gone all mopey because of my place in the universe?'

'You started tearing up when you couldn't donate money to the local animal shelter. Fitz had to take you home to sleep it off.'

'That's just the medication.'

'You've been having episodes again.'

'Yes, yes, yes, but they're still years apart, and reducing in frequency. Anywhere between one and ten a year, usually around Christmas. Predictable and safe. Ish. Safe-ish.'

At this point a young man approached and took a seat, removing his wide-brim hat and grey trench coat.

'Tis the season to be emotionally unstable and hallucinating.' 

'Hello, Fitz.' 

'Hallo, Fitz!'

'Hello, me. Any tea left?'

'Help yourself.'

'Ta.'

'So, you've been having episodes.'

'No, you've been having trouble writing. You can't distract me that easily, Sally.'

There was a pause. 

'Okay you can, but I always circle back around. You can't  _ keep _ me distracted that easily.'

'I'm not having trouble writing, John, it's just that what I've written cannot have an ending except one that is aware it cannot have an ending. It's circular. Everything goes round and round in circles and the details are so established that it's all everyone will think of and keep coming back to.'

'Well… I suppose you could always find an escape clause.'

'Doc, she's been writing this bloody series since '95. The main character's death is written in stone. He has seen and destroyed his own corpse, and this temporal cold war he is perpetually hanging on the verge of keeps coming for him.'

'He could be resurrected.'

'Cheap and tawdry.'

'The corpse could have been the body of that alternate universe version of himself we know exists.'

'That was a one-shot, John. Also it's a blatant cop out.'

'Then actually kill him off. He goes out in a blaze of glory in the very first conflict of the War in Heaven. Give him that finality.'

'Actually, he does in the final conflict of the Temporal Schizm now.'

'What? When is that?'

'It's after the Cold War and the Heaven War, taking place as the climax of the Epoch of Recovery.'

'Oh. The Mangst Era.'

'Wait, wait, wait. I don't think I've read that part. Which book is it in?'

'I haven't published it yet. Fitz pointed out some problems with it.'

'Mangst.'

'Drink your tea, Fitz.'

Fitz drank his tea, and nabbed a scone for good measure.

'First off, you're going to need a bigger flowchart for all these timeline changes. Secondly, why?'

'His death was a defined point of the Heaven War, but… well I was trying to find a way around it.'

'Okay…?'

'His younger self found out about the War and set up a series of manipulations that resulted in him surviving into the Epoch of Recovery, except he's severely traumatized. He finds a weapon of unfathomable power and is inspired by the actions of the Cult of the Lost Ancestor, and travels back in time to his home world before it was destroyed, giving the weapon to the Great Six. But, breaching the protected histories like that--'

'Sally, please show him the draft of your new story. This is overly complicated nonsense.'

'Just drink your tea, Fitz.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't fully remember writing this part. 
> 
> The Blue Angel is something else.


	3. Revised Security Policies on the Implementation of Sentient Propaganda

High Chancellor Femilichrinstodvorapalusteris no longer in charge of this document.

Former contents have been folded into upcoming legistation docket 7 for Linearity Protocols in the next Witherside Low-Council meeting.

Contact Legislator Histelotelarpexiavistro for further details.


	4. Yardstick of Eternity

The dream-wall wasn't made of circles, it  _ was _ circles. The room itself, a grey void where the only distinguishing colours formed the only wall of circles and hard lines, and even that was a circle surrounding-- containing --her.

The shapes themselves were a riot of colour, no two the same shade, and none of them filled identically, the hard lines within each different in orientation, but matching the container with a sympathetic dye. All of them slowly moving in time with the turn of the room, and all of them, Maris noted, were bound together, each face bound through the faces of its neighbor's, like links in an impossible chain.

The colours shifted too, with a faint ripple each link took on the slow-moving hue of the previous. Gradual, so gradual it took moments to notice a change and minutes before it had happened in certainty, the shift so subtle in her mind that it struggled to grasp it was happening at all. There was no mistake that the lines within the links shifted more frequently, but while there was some sort of order the pattern roamed beyond recognition and understanding. 

The colours shifted around the room, passing through the links before coming to a stop and a beginning at a pure white chain containing no marking line. An empty void. As she watched the links preceding it for a time as they shifted through the spectrum the colours carried on and the room turned, but somehow it felt as though the ever-reborn white link was a manner of focus, a central point of reference. Zero.

As she patiently observed, the last coloured link began to fade toward white, a more drastic shift, and just as it was on the cusp of the transition the lines within vanished and the circle itself turned, vanishing from view like a playing card turned on its edge. A door snapping shut. The chain narrowed, shrinking the vast room by a tiny fraction, and bringing the next link into contact with the white source-end link, and the process repeated again and again endlessly. In that moment she realised: the room was not turning, it was the chain itself shrinking in a way that didn't change its size or location. 

Movement-without-movement-within-movement.

Skñelsparsi didn't have the words to convey the meaning succinctly, nor Brinar or Nörskevf. She knew that no natural language ever could.

Where did the rotated (dying?) links go, she wondered as she leaned in to examine one closely. If she squinted and strained she could almost see each link and face of lines were comprised of tiny near-invisible links of their own. She had seen clockwork mechanisms before, they were common enough, but if her guess was right, this was something not even the greatest of clockmakers and gearworkers could dream of dreaming to build. 

Gears designed to measure every moment and that moment only before being discarded, having completed a duty. A clock of infinite depth and measurement, not just broad in scale, but deeper than she could comprehend. A humbling chill ran down her spine: if she could the links within links… how deep would the mechanism go? How deep  _ could _ it go?

An measurement deeper than perception allowed.

She left the room, hurriedly returning to the ship-proper, and tried to put it from her mind. The Guardian Toymaker would still be around the TARDIS somewhere. 

Whoever this dream belonged to could keep it.

Time passed slowly, and after many, many days the grey void of the room slowly became a true unmistakable white, before turning on an imperceivable edge and 


	5. This Essay has been by-ratified by the Witherside Low-Council for the purposes of studying Enemy propaganda.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Removal from Conceptual Entity Containment may only proceed with the direct order of the High Council of the Time Lords, or an explict Presidential Decree. Security is held in stasis-lock at content priority #2.**

  
****

# **A Brief Essay on the Triumph of Art and Order**

_by an Unknown Shobogan_

Before there was order, existed the Queen of Misreason, and here she stood and she cast a shadow upon all creation and thus was her dominion. The heavenly spaces above, below, and between and to the sides were undefined, and she ruled this space of nothing and nightmare for the uncountableness of an ageless lightlessness.

Life died and consumed and was being all things life is in wonder and horror, but among this pantheon of discord arose the sons of the Queen's Daughters: the Clockwork Men, and they were excluded from the way of Misreason through their ways and thoughts and being.

Six of the most arrogant of the Clockwork Men found this to be unlikable and deemed it evil, denying the shadows of the Queen of Misrule even as her anger rose against them.

The One Was Unmade, by his own hand and will.

The Second Who Could Have Been, was lost to all things and lost all things in turn.

The third stood, the weight of disorder breaking his bones, and he denied it and he imposed Order on himself.

"This is how I shall be: Changed but whole," he said with a decided certainty. "I shall be the Clockwork King of Reason, and where you cast your shadow upon all, I cast my own shadow! I declare myself for where I stand and what I stand upon!"

The Clockwork King stood, breaking and unbroken and cast his own shadow on the world, sharing the secret with the remaining members of Arrogance and the unaligned Clockwork Men, so that they might do the same. He looked upon the world he had defined and saw disorder in the hearts of his brothers and his sister-mothers, and he saw only the influence of the Queen of Misreason.

The Queen of Misreason could not combat such a threat, and was forced beyond, howling all the way into exile as her realm collapsed into a space of Reason. In her last moments she visited a parting curse upon the Clockmen: she stole the secret of childbirth from their souls and left the Departing Doorways open for the Insidious, Unkind, and Ravenous things to creep into the world. 

Her last words promised that as long as the Clockmen lived their hearts would belong to her.

The Sister-Mothers[Invalid Translation? Requesting Manual Verification] were cast out of the Clockwork Kingdom, but they had been touched by fact and made mortal: unable to impose their will and reason like their sons, they departed into the darkness under the guilt of the Clockwork Men: Age had been visited upon them, and as the influence of the Clockwork King grew the curse was visited upon all living things. 

The King travelled and saw his domain, and despaired as the Insidious took his orderly world and crept between his rules, weaving the Order of Corruption through his work like an undying weed, and his Clockmen began to die or join the corrupted, and he saw the source of this weakness.

He considered this and spent much time in the study of his shadows until, taking a knife, he cut away his heart and cast it into the dark heavens. Using his will he grew another so that he might have a heart of reason to balance his heart of misrule. Leading the Clockmen to war, he forced the Insidious beyond the Departing Gates, sealed them beyond, and kept the way barred with steadfast watch upon it.

His Clockmen imitated him in word and deed, following him, taking up the knife, and founding the City of Wonders to save and hold the Realms of Reason. All was well, and in his peace the King came to understand the meaning and the inevitability of the Curse of the Clockmen, and he so named and defined it and brought it under the weight of his shadow.

This new and untamed Order interacted with all things, and the King of Reason saw it like threads hanging from the sky and a field of crops flexing in the breeze. 

The King looked at the threaded night and said to himself, "look at these specks of flame. I would hang these world-sky-threads[Invalid Translation? Requesting Manual Verification] on any one of them, and then I would always know where they are and they cannot be stolen from me in my distractions, curiosity or studies." 

He grasped ahold of these threads and lived his life through them anew, and when the Second Who Could Have Been died the King reached backwards to him and severed his brother's forearm, stealing it forward along the threads to himself undamaged, and so as not to burn himself he used his brother's hand and reached skyward, plucking a star out of the night.

The star was brought to the King's anvil, beaten and tempered until he had forged the perfect nail of starmetal, and he held it in place and wove the world-sky-thread[Invalid Translation? Requesting Manual Verification] around it in a pleasing pattern. 

He took his creation and displayed it to all, and it became a fundamental piece in the lives and hearts of the Clockwork people, and all the peoples beyond, and the star-nail was copied, in miniature, and distributed to all those trusted citizens of reason, that the King's Tapestry of Creation might never be unwoven.

"My King!" cried one of his subjects. "This wonder of wonders is beyond all comparison and without rival, but what is it called? I ask that we may put a name to it so that our enemies do not name it for us!"

The King thought this a strong and sensible idea, for the Sister-Motherhood[Invalid Translation? Requesting Manual Verification] remained, and their bastard half-witches reveled in the dirt over the power of names, so he gave it great thought and so he named his greatest creation.

And so Time was Named.

The secret of childbirth was never rediscovered[Warning: Manuscript Tampering Suspected], and the Motherhood remained cold and distant from their sons. Alternatives were found. 

Aeons of Aeons passed, and dissatisfaction filled the Realms of Reason. The old King had long passed, for even willpower cannot outpace the patience of Time itself, just as he had foreseen as he went to sleep, to not wake until the Fenric, the Queen's great wolf-sibling, would hunt him, and that his shadows might be better learned by those living in his absence. Prestige and wealth of intellect had long been the currency of the Clockmen, but over this time, satisfaction and humility had become dwindled resources and aspiration to the arrogance of the founders grew, and the Secret of the Timeless One was buried[Warning: Tampering].

All things had been done and conceived within the scope of Reason in this passage of time: life had been created, from unrecognizable to unmistakable, from the small to the vast. Comprehension-without-form and forms-without-comprehension, and other far stranger and far regular things, employed to guard and populate the Realms of Reason and beyond. 

Books defining Shadow were guarded and coveted by all, and the comprehension-without-form prided themselves in this duty. They were not equipped to understand what they guarded, but they were a part of it nonetheless, slipped between pages and bindings, dancing along the written words, words written in secrecy, though there is no evidence that such creatures exist or could even be created[Warning: Tampering]. This life lurked there, awaiting to spring upon those who attempted to take knowledge without permission and instead obscure, misdirect, and take from them, projecting into their minds and then running them through a sieve until these criminals might be reduced to their sole remaining value.

But that didn't stop those with authority and authorisation from falling for their own ambitions, as is how it often goes[Warning: Tampering]. 

"Look here," said some. "This great and fine weaving of Time in high repute says things should be as the way they are. And these great wonders and events of aeons past went accordingly as our King's shadow has laid out and his weavings outline."

"Is there a matter of error?" The other Clockmen said.

"We are of will and definition. As we say it is: so it was, and so shadows become and define the ground beneath us as having always been. Why not explore this unchallenged frontier? Let us alter the weaving!"

"This thing you speak of is Unreason. It is the way of the Dark Queen, and your steadiness is in question."

"If this uncertainty be unsteady then let the ground beneath me be Undefined!" and with that some cloistered themselves for many aeons in study of the deep and twisted shadows.

And then a man took up his Heart-knife and brought it down on his own heels, severing his shadow and losing his tether upon the world. The Clockmen began to fear this man in that moment for he did not vanish, he remained hearty and hale. He was defined as The Rebel, and he departed under threat of exile, and so he went his ways about the realm in search of lost secrets to make family of his own.

The Rebel went unseen for many years, gathering the lost and aimless to his side, promising them goals, hope, shelter, and companionship. Much like the Clockmen had followed their king these lost and vulnerable ones too followed this paternal figure and took up their Heart-knives to loosen their own shadows, which fled from this growing source of unreason. The darkness of order fled beyond the Realm of Reason and into the world above the Unkind lands where, to this day, they live in endless voracity, feasting upon the unwary, and mortals speak of them in whispers greatly fearing the shadows that melt the flesh. 

The last time he was seen, the Rebel entered the chamber of the Clockmen Council and lay out his own corpse before them. An example of his Insidious Self, defined from a place where he had fallen to corruption. A declaration of unforgivable Unreason. 

"Behold my mastery of the twisted shadows! I shall skin myself and make a coat, and forge armour from my bones!"

He and his entire family were cast out of the Realm of Reason and into the night where they swam and danced amongst leviathan and star whales.

They did not return until they were ready for war, and it was truly a war of wills, threatening to undermine everything that had ever been defined and reasoned into being. The survivors were few and far between, and most died of their wounds, the world too damaged to reason themselves back to health. 

The world-sky-threads[Invalid Translation? Requesting Manual Verification] snapped and faded, the star-nails they hung upon fallen from the sky and destroyed in eternal flame, but for a single nail.

Eternity passed in an instant, and heaven began to burn.

To now.

In the realms beyond the stars… drift ideas. Concepts of unreason carved from the chests of everyone who had ever first cast a shadow, long passed away.

These things, some would say, like the King's Nailstar, are anchors. While Time is an anchor of Order, these little anchors are the remnants of those dedicated to making imbalance and unreason. 

What returning path could they take if they were desperate?

Who may know that answer?

All it would take is but a momentary slip of the final nail, and their return might be assured. 

Perhaps it has already happened?

Sometimes the great artificer of a lesser realm might talk about their work as though it is alive. 

Deep forest folk will talk about seeing shadowed movement in the of the corner of their eye.

In hushed voices, lost individuals are spoken of as experiencing the influence of the yetdead, things from a time before what follows, willing the past to avert a grey future.

What form would they take if they could follow such dark ties to the world?

In the wake of war, this remainder would be the legacy of clockwork men, and that what is gone stubbornly refuses to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That moment when you forgot to include the second-most important chapter.


	6. Shatterpoint Dreams

"Who _are_ you, Doctor?"

"How d'you mean?"

"Who are you to me?"

"I'm the Doctor!"

"That doesn't mean anything! We're not friends, but we are! I hate you except when I don't! It's all your fault except when it's mine! Except when it's both or neither! Who are we? We aren't friends, so who am I to you and who are you to me?!"

"... You had a bad regeneration, didn't you?"

"Don't change the subject!"

"I'm not changing the subject, I just–"

"It's never enough! Dancing around with new faces. I took mine, I stole them, I earned them! I fought to live, my reputation! That's what kept me alive! But it's never consistent. Manic. Insane. Mercury on the brain!"

"Look, calm dow–"

"And what about you? You're no better."

"You're working yourself up. Making yourself angry because you're not angry enough yet. You've decided to do something, and you're working yourself up to it."

"'I do what I do because it's decent,' you lying self-righteous blowhard. 'I never would,' you _coward_ . So convinced you're better than the rest of us, _Doctor_ . Well, I'll tell you something. I've worked with the Daleks, I've handed people over to Nazis. I've tricked people into volunteering for cyber-conversion, and I've stolen people's minds, memories, and wills, and I did it all and more because it _benefited_ me. I'll did it again and again, and I never convinced myself I was a good person when doing them. I may have my moments of madness, Doctor, but I don't share _your_ delusions."

"It's not like that."

"I've talked people into dying for me, Doctor. It's practically a hobby at this point, but you would never let a person give up their life for you? _Really?_ You were quick to let that old croak activate the Death Particle in your place, and take the whole planet with him. Good person decision-making there. _Solid role model behaviour_."

"You don't get to judge me. Not after everything you've done."

"I'm pretty sure I'm the only person left who can, Doctor, but maybe we could give some people their memories back and ask them. Fairly sure that was a thing you'd also sworn off. I'm sure the _temp_ would be thrilled to hear it."

"That was different. Donna would have died."

"And you'd have been _sad._ Why do you get exceptions? You aren't special. _You don't deserve to be special!_ "

"Well it might help if you personally didn't routinely kill people."

"It's never hindered _you_."

"It's "hindered" me more than you could ever comprehend."

"'Oh, boo hoo, I destroyed Gallifrey. _Again_ '. How long has it been since that mattered? Did it _ever_ matter? When there were ten shadow-Gallifreys, with _hundreds more_ in the making, you barely blinked as three fizzled out of the sky and the rest were consumed as _ammunition_. Realities falling apart but wait a moment, I must brood in my dashing brown wig before engaging my mirrorverse one-armed pirate-parody doppelganger from the future in a battle to save history! _So. Totally. E_ _piiic!_ "

"That's not even close to what happened."

"Oh, I'm sorry! What did happen then? Come along, inform the class. We'd all really, _really_ like to know. Can you even tell anymore, _Timeless Child?_ You don't get to pick and choose the best bits and discard the–"

" _It's never been about the best bits!_ I do what I can, when and where I can! One problem at a time, one solution before the next, one foot in front of the other. I solve the problem in front of me before moving onto the next, and I don't choose the best bits because there _aren't_ any! I can only take pride in my tangled pathetic _mess_ of a life when I'm doing good right now, and when I'm surrounded by those who will always try to help me do _better._ To _be_ better, no matter. _That_ is something to be proud of. _That_ is something worth living for!"

"Nice speech. At least, considering you didn't answer anything."

"Life is what you make of it, and the past is how you choose to see it," the Doctor shook her head. "I once said that there was nobody else in the universe that does what me and my companions do, but I don't look back. How could I? I'd... stop living and start being, obsessing, _stagnating_ on what could have been and what is long gone when it's healthier, stronger, _better_ to keep trying _now_. That's probab'y true enough for anyone. Even Time Lords."

"And you're _not_ a Time Lord."

"Aren't I? Funny isn't it. I remember passing the trials."

"No, you don't."

"No. I don't. But we both know I did."

The Master sighed, anger sapping out of his frame he slumped. "Do we even know anything anymore."

The Doctor sat down next to him on the devastated pile of bricks, aged by decades of exposure. Tentatively, she raised an arm around to rest a hand on his far-shoulder.

Quiet fell on the empty red wasteland.

"I'd still like us to be friends," she whispered. "We know that."

Dust swirled across the barren plain. The Doctor and the Master left, departing the dream and leaving nothing but emptiness behind them.

Emptiness, forever and ever.

But the dream of Gallifrey endured.

All dreams mattered to someone, once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > Sing about the past again, and sing that same old song.
>> 
>> Tell me what you know, so I can tell you that you're wrong.
>> 
>> Just sing about the past, and the past's where you belong.
>> 
>> Let's travel to tomorrow, and learn a brand new song.
> 
> -Traditional Lowtown/Newblood Gallifreyan Nursery Rhyme
> 
> This poem was borrowed from _The Infinity Doctors_ , by Lance Parkin.


	7. Eighth Man Bound, Ninth Man Lost

_"The nature of life in most species is one of an individual linearity, even once time travel has been considered and involved linearity continues. It is the nature of the universe to smooth and simplify reality in every way possible: As water will flow downhill without intervention so the universe and its history will continue the inevitable slide toward entropy. Looped time will narrow until the gap closes, and studied futures will set a path of least resistance for the present observers._

_The linearity of the time traveller caught in an open loop becomes dangerously fragile: as their future enters flux so too does their past, risking their present self set adrift between undetermined points._ _Few studies successfully identify this transitory state between Linearity and Looped-Linearity as existing solely as a dividing line between pasts and futures unreasoned and defined out of being: To be Unbound."_

– _The Dangers of Metahistory: A Study of the First Three Laws of Time_ , by Histelotelarpexiavistro

* * *

Pazithi Gallifreya rocked as the flare lanced upward through Gallifrey’s atmosphere. 

It didn’t last.

As air turned to fuel Pazithi and the other moons shattered and ignited followed an instant later by Gallifrey itself. The blast uprooted mountains and carved through the dyson sphere at the planet’s core before continuing out the other side of the planet.

For a brief instant nothing happened. Four hundred Sky Trenches held.

The orbiting concentric fleets were gone, like dust in a hurricane. Armies burned alongside cities in the future, ocean boiled away in ages past, and in the Moment the universe caught its breath. The universe caught its breath.

Fragments of possibility, the storm of a thousand worlds consumed as ammunition and fuel, forming belts around the Homeworld. Reefs and plains of Gallifreys and Skaros, slices of infinitude sundered to ice and dust and ruins drifted, untethered. Even as the Red Capitol and the Dark Church continued their dueling descent as they fell into the maelstrom of falling oceans and mountains, both immobilised in the Supremacy's suicide run, the universe stilled. 

Silence drew out. A calm inevitability across the cosmos. 

History fell silent. History held its breath.

Qqaba the Starnail detonated.

The dyson sphere shattered outward, paling in comparison to the shockwave ripping the structure of history apart and the dimensional breach as the N-form attempted to tear its way free.

Systems holding the Eye of Harmony in suspension since the Anchoring failed. Flames propelled through the dying star and every conduit. Every surviving TARDIS-link opened at once, filling the vessels with eternal fire and screams of refugees. Time corridors, links, and exchanges ignited and the web screamed as the time vortex _burned_. Transduction barriers snapped like thread, tendrils backlashing, carving continents, local planets, and then star systems beyond. Polarfrey shattered into fragmented glaciers the size of garden-worlds, hurtling away, melting, evaporating, erased entirely.

Tiny specks attempting to flee caught the edge of a myriad of threads and holes torn in time. The Howling snatched them away from time and space and the lucky withered and bloated as the universe flowed through them. A fleet of Bowships were endlessly crushed by their future echoes as they turned to dust. Not even the N-form's writhing mass escaped, the Moment's shadow carrying onward in flame while sucking everything back into the breach, the time lock beginning to coalesce.

One speck rode onward. It found the impossible wavefront and a handful tried to follow but following was too late. To follow was to be behind.

The blast lasted forever in an instant stretching across always and ever, world after world, system after system, destroyed faster than their inhabitants could ever hope to notice. Solar winds broke, trade routes never were, an aged bishop woke up before he’d died, and an empire on a needle shook to its foundations.

Gallifrey burned. 

Had always burned. 

Had never been more than dust.

Had never been.

The lone pinpoint surged ahead. Bathed in flame it rode out the licking hungering whips, riding the edge of the scalpel a second ahead of destruction, an eternity behind salvation. 

The coward from the 49th century wrestled with the console of his crippled TARDIS as both of them began to catch alight.

The Last Great Time War burned behind them. 

Had always burned behind them.

Would never be behind them. 

Would never be at all.

Two survivors of nothing fell into the universe, one pilot and one vessel soon to find themselves Unbound.


	8. Broken Windows

'I don't understand.

'Naturally,' said the Toymaker, as the Doctor and the Master faded away, leaving only the empty badlands.

'They couldn't see us at all?'

'We were not present for their encounter. We do not fit into his memory as he dreams it.'

'But why? What's the point of showing me these things?'

'You know only of my reputation. You are looking for the game being played?'

'You're the Celestial Toymaker. You play games with lives,' Maris frowned. 'Playing games is what you do.'

'It is true.'

With a wave of his hand, the desert edge blurred, shifted. The harsh red tint of the atmosphere– _prolonged orbital bombardment_ , her training whispered –faded into the darkness of space, vast, but not empty. Gallifrey from orbit, and surrounded by star-vessels. He shifted slightly, and she realised he'd also changed at some point without her noticing. Before he had been young, clean-shaven and strangely servile like a butler, and dressed in long robes covered in gems dangling from lengths of gold chain. Now he appeared far older with an immaculately groomed beard, dressed in not entirely disagreeable clothing that she vaguely recognised.

"All creatures that play games do so to entertain themselves when they are not otherwise occupied. I am known as the Toymaker, but I continue to be one of the Guardians. It is... an occupation."

She considered this, as she tried to work out what she was standing on. The Six Guardians of Time, worshiped by some as the Six-fold God. The Toymaker was the Crystal Guardian of… imagination? Fantasy?

'Fantasy and Dreams,' said the figure.

A large saucer-ship whipped past, raining laser fire into the side of a behemoth, attempting to target a nimble bowship hiding behind the bulk.

'You're showing me dreams? Other people's dreams?'

'Indeed.'

'But... why?'

He turned to look at her, a pitying look on his face.

'You are one of the few ephemeral sensitives that have also seen through the contradiction.'

Memories loomed in the back of her mind, of the Potential Engine spitting out page after page of contradictory biographical data, of the dead technicians twisted in painful ways, and of the human-form TARDIS hiding and pursuing from the shape of a vengeful little child.

'You are almost there.'

She blinked, startled from her thoughts. Far away something on Gallifrey's surface a fireball the size of a city shrunk into nothing. Spires fell together as a missile flew in reverse back to wherever it had been launched.

'You're showing me the future.'

'Futures. Plural.'

'That's not possible. It _can't_ be possible.'

'Time has never really mattered in dreams.'

'But the transduction barriers, the conceptual warding around Gallifrey–'

'Hold power only as long as Gallifrey stands eternal.'

A huge red structure, all brick and spires rolled around the side of the planet before grinding itself to a halt against the atmosphere above the Death Zone. Tiny flecks flocked around it and began to burn, the remains of smaller vessels caught in its gravitational wake.

'This is how Gallifrey ends?'

In the distance a damaged TARDIS toppled through space-time, the interior pulled out through a tear in the damaged outer-shell, bleeding out several miles before being pulled in back inside in a loop of conceptually mapped space. It carved a chunk of the behemoth out as it fell past, the debris vanishing as the loop chewed it up and pulled through the internal dimensions.

'You have seen the infinite possibilities of the Doctor,' said the Guardian of Time. 'Right now he is attempting to enter the Ancestor Cell. He is attempting to create an eye using a magic key and a gun. He is breaching a secret vault below the citadel to unleash a weapon that has not yet been made. He is dying far away on Dust, and Dronid, and Trenzalore, and Earth, and Gallifrey. He is activating the galaxy eater as we speak. He is handing the prison of discord itself to an ancient engineer. He fights Rassilon, and the Master, and the false Grandfather, and Centro one at a time and all together.'

Something moved out of Gallifrey's shadow slowly, like an eclipsing moon. So slowly she thought she had to be mistaken. A structure shaped like a vast flower, its petals endlessly opening, only to reveal more opening petals, phasing through and between each other, and all made of the whitest, purest bone. The red spire-ship pulled away from Gallifrey, drawn into the thing's maw. It wasn't large enough to swallow a planet, but megastructures and even moons like Pazithi...

'I can't... I can't comprehend this. _Nobody_ could comprehend this.'

Space bucked and warped around the endless flower, windows tearing open, glimpses of distant worlds colliding, launching, hurtling through the void, before they were gone. For a briefest moment the universe stopped, and then the flower vanished too, and millions of the warring vessels overlapped and replaced with more and more and more Dalek saucer-ships, and–

Pazithi Gallifreya rocked as the flare lanced upward through the planet's atmosphere.

The Guardian turned to look at her, one being of six whole.

'They will talk about the Time War as though it never was.'


	9. Order Out of Order

They will talk about the Time War as though it never was.

They’re uninformed. Simple things, bustling over the skin of the universe like it is the only thing there is. There is nothing beyond their own experiences. Arrogant simple things.

I release the embrace. The Shalka reduce Earth to fire and rubble. Time is.

How deep the depths do go. How far you must travel to see the great skeleton of reality? How long will you wait before recognising it is only denser flesh? What is it like to hold religious certainty that the water you stand on is bedrock?

They will talk about the Last Great Time War like it ended, if they remember at all.

Golden light dances about my sight, hidden from all others. I embrace it as I redirect a stolen Time Lord vessel. The Last Pythian wages war on the Racnoss.

Several chains of events unfold. Time is.

_Eternal as you understand the term._

The assault on the Death Zone begins too late to prevent the resurrection. A human carves his way through a Dalek squadron with a chainsword, living to repeat the process. An empty wake moves through space-time, an eroding blade that carved planets into dust. Time Lords unmake the universe and rebuild it without true magic. Yssgaroth enters a star system and consumes the Ipa civilisation before moving onto the planets, and then the star. The Shalka reduce Earth to fire and rubble.

Time is.

I beckon to the light, offering a first and final embrace, and I redirect a stolen Time Lord vessel. Planets are carved into dust by a wake of entropy, billions of star systems die.

“The Moment has been prepared for,” the Doctor says as his body dies. Ever cagey, the shadow of the Curator she will be. He had long suspected. A scarred and broken ghost of neverwhere wandering and watching with me steps in, and the shadow regenerates.

An emergency fuel dump sparks the beginning of the new and the end of the old, a space station rides the shockwave into the centre of the 33rd century. Omega screams and screams and screams and screams and screams and screams as he passes beyond the event horizon.

The Curator’s shadow stands before me in the desert, young and old, all and alike, and nervous. I sit in a chair beneath an umbrella, this is where I have always am. Light cannot survive what approaches in the dark, and we know it.

Ephemerals talk about the Time War like it never happened.

[ _Doctor._ ](https://youtu.be/4lCrV4s7Avc)

He is aboard his TARDIS. “Yes?”

 _Your presence is required_.

He approaches an empty chair beneath an umbrella in the Pasar Desert. I sit in the chair beneath the umbrella.

“Listen, I, er, don’t want to appear rude, but… who are you?” Reluctance to leave his TARDIS wars with his self-preservation and the appeal of theatrical irreverence. Little convincing is required. He departs and approaches an empty chair beneath an umbrella in the Pasar Desert and we hold conversation.

_There are times, Doctor, when the forces within the universe upset the balance, to such an extent that it becomes necessary to stop everything._

“Stop everything?” Incredulity.

I guarantee the consequences of non-compliance. Arcadia burns, and Gallifrey falls.

_For a brief moment only._

The light commits itself, divides itself. Reconstructed. Hidden in a box. More than one. Not quite an N-form, and not yet self-aware. I redirect a stolen TARDIS. Arcadia burns. Gallifrey falls.

“Ahh.”

_Until the balance is restored. Such a moment is rapidly approaching. These segments must be traced and returned to me before it is too late. Before the universe is plunged into eternal chaos._

“Eternal chaos?”

_Eternal as you understand the term._

Time is.

The Doctor will never willingly relinquish the six segments. Especially not to me.

The Last Great Time War is.

But the Moment is not. 

Not yet.


	10. The First Dream

The Doctor thought about a lot of things, but gave some a lot more effort than others.

One day, while the Doctor was brooding on a bench in a unreasonably nice garden, the subject suddenly sat down.

'Will you stop thinking about me all the time.' she said, still in the form of Rose Tyler. 'It's getting a bit annoying.'

The Doctor stared quietly, before:

'But why did you do it? What was in it for you?'

The Moment smiled, not _quite_ as flirtatious as memories would suggest, but close enough.

'I may be the interface of the deadliest weapon in the universe, but I still want the same thing everyone wants out of a relationship.

'Which is?'

'To not be used.' And with an impression to rival the Cheshire cat she was gone.

The next time the Doctor saw her, she was standing knee-deep in the water along a riverbank on Metraxis Prime. A year had passed, but the conversation hadn't.

'I did it because the universe needs someone, Doctor, and you were in danger of stopping. You have no idea how necessary you are.'

'Don't be daft.'

'I'm serious, Doctor. If you didn't exist we would have to dream you, and every time we'd try and we would remember you a little differently.'

'The Doctor is just an idea in my head.'

The air shivered for a moment, before parting to reveal a tall beareded man, caucasian-looking but dressed like a Qing bureaucrat, followed by a young woman in far simpler robes. 'And what do you think dreams are, Doctor?' asked the Crystal Guardian with a smile, as he stepped onto the dew-laden grass.

'Didn't I lock you inside an inescapable prison?'

'Multiple times, but our emnity isn't the purpose behind my visit,' he turned to look at the woman. 'Maris here has tired of our dreamwalking, and needs to return home.'

The Doctor turned to look into the eyes of Rose Tyler. 'So this is what I am now, a glorified taxi service?'

'I think that would be the TARDIS, wouldn't it?' she pondered thoughtfully.

The Doctor ignored her, getting up and focusing on Maris. 'Fine, anything to get out of here. Where do you need to go?'

'Uh, Gallifrey.'

Maris received most unamused look the Doctor could muster up.

'If you're quick you might catch it before it gets destroyed again,' pointed out the Guardian. 

' _Again_ , again.' The Moment added, helpfully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue slightly lifted/paraphrased from the _Day of the Doctor_ novelisation, by Steven Moffat.


End file.
